Jon Rafman's Sculpture Garden

JON RAFMAN
Sculpture Garden

June 20 - September 13, 2015

Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art (referred to as MAC, an abreviation from the French Musée d'art contemporain), has launched a new exhibition. It features two Montreal artists: David Altmejd and Jon Rafman. I found the Jon Rafman's audio-visual installation Sculpture Garden especially relevent. You can see the physical part of the installation in the photo above, the rest exists in an electronically created virtual space of a 360 degrees video and Oculus Rift DK2.

The two physical sculptures are both made from polystyrene. One is covered with a silver leaf and is entitled New Age Demanded (Waverider Silver), 2015. The other is covered with a gold leaf and is entitled New Age Demanded (Futurisimo Gold), 2015. The one covered with a silver leaf looks like a reclining female figure. You can see similar reclining figures on the left, in the Henry Moore's drawing from the Montreal Museum of Fine Art collection. The other piece, covered with the gold leaf, looks like a stylized male bust. Both sculptures are very sleek and stylish.They are wearing very well their respective gold or silver finish, both metals held in great respect by people. Yet this glitter is "skin deep", only a make-believe, since the inside content is quite mundane.

Once you put the required paraphernalia over your eyes and ears, you become totally immersed in an audio-visual virtual reality. It exists around you, and becomes more revealed and intense as you take steps to the left, to the right, or turn backward. The two physical sculptures are constantly present in the virtual landscape that is desolate and even appears to be post-apocalyptic, with a lonely, torn-apart-man-made structure from which pieces of geometrical shapes are flying away in all directions. The strobing, pulsating sound intensifies the vision. The sound is similar to the New-Age brain entrainment type of technology with hypnotic, overpowering, and even invasive quality. Right from the start it comes on with such an intensity that it appears to be the cause of the desolation in this virtual reality, as if representing an aftermath of some sound-wave-weapon attack. 

The allusion seem to be projected that in the post-apocalyptic scenario trivial human values such as gold and silver, the prestige. the slickness, the richly clad people - all of this is quite irrelevant. It seems to be suggested that at the end only purely aesthetic values survive and counts.

The work deals with deconstructing the physical reality while transforming it into a tightly constructed aesthetic experience. Could the final destruction of the reality, the apocalypse, be for some perceived as an aesthetic experience, moreover, a virtual aesthetic experience since there will be no humans left to experience it in real terms? Or maybe the aesthetics are assuming for some a place of a new "New Age" type of religion?

The inconvenient part of this work - only one person at a time can experience it. And since it takes time, not everybody who would have liked to fully view the piece is going to be able to do so. 

For more information about the current exhibition, or any other exhibitions at the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, visit the museum's website.

Montreal First Peoples Festival 2015

Présence autochtone
Montreal First Peoples Festival
25th Edition

July 29 - August 5, 2015

This year, the Montreal First Peoples Festival celebrates its 25th anniversary. This is a very popular festival, attended by many Montrealers and others from far away. Many are families with children.

In addition to the music and dance shows performed every day on the stage at the Place des Festivals, there will also be several performances by the Street Theatre on July 29 and 30, with the audience sitting on the steps seen in the photo above. Also, a number of films will be shown, both indoors, and outdoors at the Place des Festivals. This year the film selection has been especially vigorous and the films chosen are of exceptionally high quality and relevance.

One of the Montreal First Peoples Festival's attractions has been already launched today, more than a month before the start of the festival itself. It is an exhibition of Michel Depatie's art works, on display at the Maison de la Culture Frontenac between June 17 - August 22, 2015. The exhibition is entitled La Traversee/Ashu-takusseu. Below is a photo of the exhibition area.

In the photo below, Michel Depatie is posing next to his work called Autoportrait. It represents not only a portrait of himself but also of a multitude of First Nation People whose images were brought together to create this very impressive digital print on paper.

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To learn more about Michel Depatie's La Traversee/Ashu-takusseu visit the Ashu-takusseu project's website:

http://ashu-takusseu.com

For more information on the Montreal First Peoples Festival, all its activities, films and dates, visit the festival's website:

http://presenceautochtone.ca

MMFA 2015: Michael Williams - Yard Salsa

Michael Williams
Yard Salsa

June 9 - September 27, 2015

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) is presenting a new exhibition in its Contemporary Art Square. It features a US emerging artist Michael Williams. It is his first exhibition in Canada.

On display are around 60 drawings and 12 paintings. Eleven paintings are located in the temporary exhibitions' hall. One additional painting, shown directly above on the left, is a promised gift to the MMFA, and it is located in the museum's permanent collection across the hallway on the same floor.

The painting above to the right, entitled Yard Salsa, had provided the name to this exhibition. Majority of Michael Williams' paintings are first composed on a computer screen, then the file is given to a printer who prints the image on a huge inkjet printer onto a pre-gessoed canvas. Some works are considered complete and finished at that point. The others, the artist airbrushes those prints and applies additional paint. This is how some acquire a doodling impression.

Michael Williams said he identified himself the most with his painting The Morning Zoo, in front of which he poses below, because it encompasses his question whether he would continue painting if he were totally spiritually satisfied. With the man's head in the painting being Buddha-like, him holding a painting brush in his right extended hand, and the classical perspective pointing straight towards the painting, one is inclined to doubt that Williams would ever give up his art, under any circumstances.

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For more information, visit the MMFA website.

GUIDED TOURS 
SATURDAY AND SUNDAY, JUNE 13 TO AUGUST 30, 2015, FROM 1.30 TO 3.30 P.M., MUSEUM GUIDES WILL BE ON HAND IN THIS GALLERY TO ANSWER QUESTIONS AND DISCUSS THE EXHIBITED WORKS. 

PAC 2015: The Aztecs

People of the Sun
The Aztecs

May 30 - October 25, 2015

Pointe-à-Callière Museum (PAC) is presenting a major international exhibition, The Aztecs, People of the Sun. Visitors have a unique opportunity to learn about the people who founded the amazing city of Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec Empire and the site where Mexico City was built after the Spanish Conquest in 1521. The exhibition documents at length the founding of Tenochtitlan, people's daily lives, and their everyday and ritual objects.

The exhibition also focuses on two Aztec calendars, the Templo Mayor, and also on the religious human sacrifices. It looks at many themes in Aztec's rich history: the Aztecs’ migration, guided by their god Huitzilopochtli; the founding of Tenochtitlan; the remarkable urban planning and land use development in this “Venice of Mexico”; the Aztec art of war and the tribute paid to conquerors by the conquered peoples; and their agricultural techniques and chinampas, the ingenious floating gardens that made the city self-sufficient. 

The exhibition also looks at the organization of Aztec society and its different classes. It elaborates on the role of women, education and the administration of justice. Aztec writing, the famous codices - manuscripts made up of glyphs or pictograms illustrating the spoken language - are also examined. Religion, essential and omnipresent in Aztec society, is also brought into focus, along with various deities, rituals and believes.

The exhibition was produced in collaboration with the Mexican National Council for Culture and the Arts – National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). It showcases some 265 items from 16 Mexican museums, including the Templo Mayor Museum, an archaeological site museum like Pointe-à-Callière itself, and the Mexican National Museum of Anthropology.

A great variety of objects is on display, both spectacular and moving. There are masks and statues, gold jewellery, figurines of women, children and animals, stamps for creating patterns on fabric and skin, chests, boxes for offerings, vases and ceramics, sculptures and objects relating to the sacrifices which it was believed were required to keep the Sun on its daily journey. They all reflect the mysteries surrounding the Aztec culture and people. 

The exhibition closes with a description of the Spanish conquest, the fall of the Aztec Empire, and the legacy of the Aztecs today. 

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For more information, visit the Pac Museum website

http://www.pacmusee.qc.ca/en

MMFA 2015: Rodin - Metamorphoses

RODIN - Metamorphoses
In Rodin's Studio

May 30 - October 18, 2015

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts presens a new exhibition Metamorphoses: In Rodin’s Studio. It was produced by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in collaboration with the Musée Rodin in Paris and had already circulated in the United States. This exhibition features close to 300 works and is the largest Rodin exhibition ever presented in Canada. It includes masterpieces that are being shown for the first time in North America.

The Musée Rodin and its director Catherine Chevillot have generously loaned 171 sculptures. They include rarely lent 94 precious plasters (plaster casts) which are special and fragile witnesses of master’s work. Plaster is the material best suited to perceiving Rodin’s manner of working. As the original works in raw clay could not be preserved, the plasters remain the most faithful stamp of his art.

Among the other loans from generous Canadian and international collaborators is the marble The Hand of God from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Additional lenders include some fifteen institutions and private collectors in Canada, France and the United States, among them the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Legion of Honor and the Los Angeles County Museum. Finally, a few sculptures by contemporaries and students of Rodin, such as Bourdelle, Carriès, Claudel and Desbois, help to complete the vision of the artist impetus in the Rodin's studio.

The exhibition also includes three rare pieces in terracotta, a glass paste, a porcelain, four stoneware pieces, fourteen precious marbles and a major selection of bronze castings of both older and more recent vintage. Also, there are eighty six old photographs, and a number of drawings and watercolours which will be shown in rotation because of their fragility.

In addition, one will see the Museum’s recent acquisition - an important collection of 70 photographs taken by Eugène Duet, a close collaborator of Rodin. 

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For more information, visit the MMFA website.

MMFA 2015: From Gainsborough to Moore

From Gainsborough to Moore
200 YEARS OF BRITISH DRAWINGS

April 15 - August 16, 2015

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is exhibiting some forty British drawings from its permanent collection in its graphic arts centre. The works represent 200 years of British Drawings and range from Gainsborough  to Moore.

This exhibition includes works by Beerbohm, Burne-Jones, Chadwick, Cotman, Cox, Flaxman, Gainsborough, Gilpin, Moore, Mortimer, Nash, Nicholson, Richardson, Romney, Rowlandson, Ruskin, Sandby and Solomon, as well as a magnificent monumental watercolour by Turner.

Since works on paper are fragile and their exposure to light must be limited, this will be one of the few times visitors will be able to view this prestigious collection of works. 

The variety of styles and subjects reflect British art and culture from the mid-eighteenth to the late twentieth century. While landscapes understandably dominate the exhibition, portraits, figure studies, genre scenes, caricatures and religious subjects are also presented.

Here is one of the MMFA’s recent acquisitions: Oedipus and his Daughters by John Flaxman, one of the most influential artists of the neoclassical movement, and the most famous sculptor in England during his lifetime. The drawing illustrates Oedipus at Colonus, the second play in Sophocles’s Oedipal trilogy. Oedipus is seated at centre, rejected by the men of the village of Colonus over his tragic, unwitting marriage to his own mother, Jocasta, who hanged herself upon realizing the truth. Having blinded himself, Oedipus sits with his two devoted daughters, Ismene and Antigone.

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Visit the MMFA website.

MMFA 2015: Marion Wagschal

MARION WAGSCHAL
PORTRAITS, MEMORIES, FABLES 

April 8 - August 9, 2015

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, in association with the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, is presenting the works of the Montreal artist Marion Wagschal. This is her first monograph exhibition at a Quebec museum. On display are close to thirty paintings produced between 1971 and 2014. They represent an overview of the painter's career. At the time when art largely favoured abstraction, Wagschal had chosen for her artistic expression figurative painting - portraiture and allegorical forms. 

Wagschal shows a preference for empathetic and even extravagant figuration. Her family members and their shared histories play an important part in stories and characters she portrays on canvasses. Her personal experiences shape the subject matter and the compositions, as she chooses to portray what she perceives as a reality in terms of an imaginary fiction.

For more information on this and other exhibitions at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, visit the museum's website.

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MMFA 2015: Benoit Aquin

Benoit Aquin
Mégantic in Pictures

February 18 - May 24, 2015

Benoit Aquin is one of the few photographers to have been allowed an access to Lac-Mégantic’s ground zero, the site of the derailment. He visited the site on multiple occasions, documenting the environmental impact from the oil spill on neighbouring land and waterways. He blurs the lines between journalistic and art photography.

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts' exhibition featured close to forty photographs, bearing witness to the aftermath of the derailment and how the everyday life has changed forever in Lac-Mégantic.

For twenty-five years, Benoit Aquin, the Montreal photographer, has travelled the world to document the environmental issues and the human stories linked to them. His approach is in tune with the various social and human issues of his time. 

His works on the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake were exhibited at the McCord Museum and you can read about it in my post here.

http://artframe.blogspot.ca/2013/02/mccord-museum-2013-benoit-aquin.html

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